Volume 11, Issue 2, 2020
Aaran Burns
Pages 133-148
Scepticism without Knowledge-Attributions
The sceptic says things like “nobody knows anything at all,” “nobody knows that they have hands,” and “nobody knows that the table exists when they aren't looking at it.” According to many recent anti-sceptics, the sceptic means to deny ordinary knowledge attributions. Understood this way, the sceptic is open to the charge, made often by Contextualists and Externalists, that he doesn't understand the way that the word “knowledge” is ordinarily used. In this paper, I distinguish a form of Scepticism that is compatible with the truth of ordinary knowledge attributions and therefore avoids these criticisms. I also defend that kind of Scepticism against the suggestion that it is philosophically uninteresting or insignificant.